Although the Marvel vs. Capcom franchise is one of the most iconic throughout the fighting game genre, there remains many details of their development that remain unknown in the West due to the language barrier / being lost to time.
That’s why it’s always cool and fascinating any time an original developer from the ’90s pops up to discuss what went into making the games like we have today.
A Japanese X / Twitter user recently posted online wondering what the upcoming Marvel vs. Capcom Fighting Collection: Arcade Classics is going to do with one of its new features.
The upcoming MvC collection allows players in X-Men Children of the Atom, which just got its own trailer, to select the previously boss-only characters of Magneto and Juggernaut as playable fighters, but what happens to the colors if both users were to select Magneto?
This question apparently caught the eye of Atsushi “Tomichin” Tomita, who worked as a planner on all of the MvC games from X-Men through Marvel vs. Capcom: Clash of Super Heroes.
He provided some insight as to why the first entries in the series were lacking on the front of color options, which apparently came down to difficulties getting approval to use alternate palettes .
2PカラーはX-MEN当時なかなかマーヴル社のOKが出なくて
1Pのちょっと色味が変わった程度のものしかチェックを通らなかったけど
だんだん緩くなって
X-MEN VS. ストリートファイターでは全然違う色でも通るようになった
あきまん氏に色を作ってもらって
横で時々寝落ちしながらどれにするか話してた記憶 https://t.co/rpFGXJXDCk— トミー朕 (@tommy_tin) August 13, 2024
“For 2P colors, back then Marvel didn’t really give us the OK on any of our suggestions,” wrote Tomita as translated by our own Nicholas ‘MajinTenshinhan’ Taylor. “Just the slightest variations of the 1P colors were all that passed their checks, but they gradually become more lenient.
“By the time of X-Men vs. Street Fighter, we were allowed to use completely different colors. I remember that Akiman was the one who drew them and I clearly remember myself sitting next to him, falling asleep while talking about which ones to use.”
Alternate colors were something that Capcom started including all the way back in 1992 with Street Fighter 2: Champion Edition adding the ability to play mirror matches with the same character, and it’s something they’d continue to expand out in SF2 and their other games of the era.
If you go back to X-Men Children of the Atom that came out in 1994, however, they do technically have different colors between player 1 and player 2 though as the former developer pointed to, are mostly just slight variations.
Wolverine wore a darker shade of blue, Sentinel had its contrast turned down and Storm had hers turned up.
The only ones who truly looked a bit more different were Colossus trading his red for orange with a different hue to his metal while Cyclops and Psylocke swapped their blues for purple.
Click images for larger versions
Since this was the first time Marvel worked with Capcom on a fighting game and entering unexplored territory together, it does make sense that the comic book maker would be wary of letting the Japanese developer drastically change up the appearance of their iconic heroes and villains.
They would obviously loosen up in the following years, but the need to get approval from multiple parties is still a challenge when it comes to collaborative projects / IP, especially with Marvel.
If you look back to Marvel Super Heroes, there was more of a mix between variants and full on palette swaps and then X-Men vs. Street Fighter finally got to go more wild with their picks like gold Storm, pink Rogue and blue Magneto.
It would take until the Sega Saturn and PlayStation entries for these games, however, to add more than two selectable colors, which won’t be included in the MvC Fighting collection.
Marvel vs. Capcom 2 would finally take things even farther by including six colors for every fighter.
What is a bit funny is Tomita doesn’t actually answer what does happen if you pick two Magnetos in Children of the Atom.
As far as we can tell, him and Juggernaut both only have one color each, so they might just look the same on both sides.
It could be technically possible that the developers could try adding a color from a future title, but we highly doubt that for a multitude of reasons.
If anything, the team behind the collection may just apply something like a different shader or other option to make them appear at least somewhat unique from each other.
The Marvel vs. Capcom Fighting Collection still doesn’t have a release date beyond 2024 yet, but it’s currently in development for the PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch and PC while skipping over Xbox.